[ C L A S S I F I E D ]

♔ 「 @mythlived​​ asked : [  skill  ]  sender  tries  to  assist  receiver  in  learning  a  new  skill 。 」

❦ ❞ Every now and then, Nona was reminded that she should really learn some self-defense skills; someone had grabbed her at work that day, and even though nothing came from it, she recalled that moment of fear, how she’d frozen completely rather than try to free herself. She needed to work on that, and while the moment remained fresh in her mind, she brainstormed her options.

Pyrrha had been busy with schoolwork, Eva was out of town, and Kyr still scared her a little too much ( which would perhaps be useful later…? ), and it took her a few minutes to recall, but didn’t Rhys know some martial arts too? That would work—-she trusted him, after all.

And he turned out to be available that afternoon, so instead of spreading mats out in her living room for yoga, she prepared for a different lesson.

“I think one of the main things, um, is that I have to practice not freezing up,” she admitted sheepishly. “Would that be the best place to start, or somewhere else…?”

    (  ➹  )  ━  Rhys wasn’t quick to anger, so he didn’t get angry often. He could probably count the number of times he’d felt anything close to it on one hand, though he wondered if it could count for two—how he’d felt hearing about Nona’s encounter at work. So he had been quick to agree to help her with self-defense, though the concerns about his agreeing did come along a little later. He had already agreed, though, and he didn’t want her to be in a position where she couldn’t get herself out if it ever arose again. 

Given the circumstance, he was glad he had taken to sparring with Nikita and Pyrrha again, not that he intended to spar with Nona—certainly not on Day One, anyway—but it never hurt to knock the rust off, especially when you intended to teach someone the basics of self-defense. He’d need to remember to thank at least one of them for it later. 

He pauses in his stretching, leaned over his right leg and pulling his foot toward him, to think about Nona’s question, humming as he did. The freeze response was a natural human reaction to being attacked. The brain’s way of trying to keep whatever or whoever was after you from seeing you, but it didn’t work so much if that person was already right in front of you. It was a response that had mostly been beaten out of him very early. He didn’t often freeze anymore when it came to physiological attacks, even if sometimes he still froze because of other things, like feeling a little too much a little too fast, from time to time. 

❛   @duskwilt​​​​​​​ asked:   [Pyrrha; Rila] [ OPEN ]:     sender wordlessly opens their arms out to offer the receiver a long-awaited hug. ❜    !  

❛   @duskwilt​​​​​​ asked:    [Kaede; Rui] ‘do you want some company?’ ❜    !  

     ( ♬ ) —   Rui couldn’t remember giving up her little hiding corner to Kaede, but perhaps she had one day, thinking he may need it just to get away and decompress for a moment. That’s what she was doing now, after all, curled in on herself, arms wrapped around her legs and teary-eyes buried into her knees. She had wanted to be alone, when she’d first slipped away after getting yelled at by a guest in the café. On top of that, she’d been told that morning that Eita wouldn’t be home for her birthday, like he’d promised—and what was worse was that he’d had their mother break it to her instead of breaking the news to her himself, the coward. She had also spilled water all over one of her brand new compositions at breakfast. It was like a strange series of unfortunate events that day and the old man raising his voice at her had been the icing on the cake of it all. She’d had to separate herself. She hadn’t meant to start crying, and yet here she was. 

❛   @duskwilt​​​​​​ asked:    [Pyrrha; Rhys] ❝ if you love a character, you give them pain, ruin their lives, make them suffer. maybe even throw in a heroic death. ❞ ❜    !  

     (  ➹  )  ━  Rhys is sprawled on his back, one arm tucked under his head and the other laying simply on his stomach while he allows himself to be bathed in the gentle sunlight of late summer through the branches of the tree Pyrrha is leaning back against. He enjoys listening to her talk about writing, about worlds that don’t exist anywhere but in the minds of readers and writers, of how they’re conceptualized, how the characters fit into their worlds  (  or rather, how the world is shaped around its characters  ), and the way the stories begin to piece themselves together. It wasn’t a new topic, necessarily, but more often than not they talked about already-written books as opposed to the creation of one not yet on someone’s shelf somewhere. Either way, it’s a relaxing pastime and a good way to keep their minds on something less... pressing. 

❛   @duskwilt​​​​​​ asked:    "Hey, hey," Pyrrha waves her fork to garner Rasmus' attention, "do you think that if I noogied you hard enough, your hair would turn pink?" ❜    ! 

❛   @duskwilt​​​​​​ asked:    [Pyrrha; Nikita] "There are some things you cannot control, and I am at least three of them." ❜    !  

      (  ⚔  )  —   Pyrrha, Nikita has found, is an interesting personality. That, at the very least, he could admit.  ❝  People should never seek to control other people, so I can't say I'm surprised or disappointed that you're at least three of the things I can't control.  ❞  He offers this statement with perfect nonchalance. Nikita would, of course, be lying if he said that he didn’t do his best to control every possible variable of any given situation and while he wasn’t particularly perturbed by lying, he also didn’t count people within controllable variables. They very rarely were. Even when you took every possible precaution to keep a person on a certain track and within your own sphere of influence things still inevitably went awry—he, Rhys, and Rasmus were evidence enough of that. To control a human, he supposed you would have to take away every aspect of their humanity. But even stripped away down to the very basics of what they needed to survive and function, people would always be people. They would always claw their way into whatever they wanted to be. 

He knew Pyrrha was likely poking fun with some level of truth underlying what she said. It seemed to be something she did fairly often. As if the gravity of any given situation could be lessened in jest. Perhaps it could. Though he thought that was an ideal in which their basic beliefs differed. Then again, perhaps he was relying too much on his own observation and assumption. Oh well, a thought for another time. 

❛   Anonymous asked:    How does Emery view casual flings?  ❜    !

❛   @duskwilt​​​​​​ asked:    [Gino; Ioanna] ❝ I really enjoy being judged. ❞  ❜    !  

    (  ❀  )  ━   Sometimes she isn’t entirely sure how she gets anything done with the MBM ever-present in her life. They all regularly had something entertaining to say and she loves every single individual in the club dearly. Still, that doesn’t keep her from missing the context of what’s being said at least forty percent of the time because she’d focusing on some case or another. This was one such time, though she was almost certain Gino had been talking about Alice judging him for something—as daughters were wont to do to their parents. As they should, too. Since she couldn’t remember exactly what he’d just said to her, Ioanna scoffs at Gino, raising an eyebrow as she puts her pen down.  ❝  Lucky for you, you’ve come to the right place today, too.  ❞  She moves her arms out into a wide semicircle,  ❝  Anyone in my line of sight gets judged free of charge and with all of my personal prejudices attached, isn’t that great  ?  ❞  

❛   @duskwilt​​​​ asked:   [Ellie; Apollo] ❛ you’re my family too. ❜  !

     (  ☀  )  —  It takes Apollo a split second longer than it should to comprehend what’s been said to him, but when he does, his breath catches. Aside from the small hitch, silence follows the words and he finds that he’s gone impossibly still. Far more still than he’s been in a very long time. But there were some things that took your very ability to exist with ease from you and words were often one of those things. You’re my family too. He was, he supposed. She had been his daughter in another life. Beloved by so many, not least of all him. There was little in this world that any person could love more than their own children. Or that was the way it should have been. So it was often difficult not to press into their daily lives, especially when it seemed to be leading them toward tragedy. Eurydice, he thought, was someone he would always think of. Ellie, though a different person sharing the same soul, seemed to be set on forcing him to understand his worth outside of how he and Artemis interacted or how he and Esther chose to dance around each other  (  literally and figuratively, as it were  ).

It takes him a long moment to regain his composure, to begin moving again, albeit just enough to turn his attention to her in full, to scrutinize the expression on her face, the lilt of her words. She didn’t seem to be patronizing him or mocking him for his explanation of past lovers and family. You’re my family too. It rang in his head. Bounced around like a pinball in a machine that was maybe broken but no one could really tell to see if it needed fixing. It looped.

❛   @duskwilt​​​​​ asked:     [Kyr; Pat] Kisses Meant To Distract The Other Person From Whatever They Were Intently Doing  !  

(  ♛  )  —  Patroclus had, on average, study days that lasted about eight hours. However, some days were a little shorter study-wise and some were a little longer. Some days he wasn’t quite sure what that would look like. Especially as he approached graduation, the end of rotations, and his moving into residency. It was a lot to deal with all at one time, even if he was still pretty sure the busiest days were yet to come. In some ways, he was excited for that because it meant he would be moving forward into what he’d always wanted to do. In other ways, he found he dreaded it. Not necessarily residency itself, but rather the loss of time sometimes. It also made him feel an overwhelming sense of relief that Kyr was so understanding of the goals he’d been trying to achieve since before they’d even met. Though, he also had to remind himself that he needed to be actively aware of when Kyr might be feeling ignored. Patroclus tried incredibly hard never to do that, to always set his study schedule and follow it exactly so that it didn’t roll over into plans they had  (  and he was normally very good about holding to that schedule, if he did say so himself, even if he did occasionally study when Kyr was over or ask Kyr to actively help him to be sure he’d memorized the things he needed to  )  but today had turned out a little bit differently than planned. 

His first mistake, he figured, was assuming everything would go smoothly at work and he wouldn’t be called in on his day off. Unfortunately for him, he’d gotten a call from a very flustered Margot about an irate customer because one of their machines was down and they couldn’t do frappes. Imagine that. So that was strike number one for his day. He’d gotten up, gotten ready, and gone in to try to divert the crisis as best he could. He’d ended up giving them a gift card and sending them on their way with a promise of getting the machine up as quickly as they could. Then he’d had to call maintenance and cover the register while Margot stepped into the back for an early break. He’d left as soon as someone else had gotten there and told Margot to let him know if she needed anything else when she’d started apologizing. The second strike on his day was realizing he’d locked his keys in his car and having to call Briseis to bring his spare. She laughed at him the entire time they were on the phone and then gotten stuck in traffic and switched to half-hearted threats about being late to work herself—which she was not. They’d both gotten where they needed to be safely and quickly enough. Strike three was after he had gotten home and settled in to study. Strike three, though, he didn’t mind too much, since it came in the form of kisses he was decidedly not expecting. 

He was sitting at his desk, earbuds in as he listened to and noted down the lecture he was supposed to have started when he’d first gotten up. He was listening to it faster than was strictly necessary to try and make up for the lost time, but even then it seemed like he’d still managed to lose track of time. It was only when a shadow fell over him and he had little more than a couple of seconds to startle before he felt Kyr draping himself over him, pressing several kisses to his cheek. Pat huffed a soft laugh, pulling his earbuds out to lean back into Kyr, turning into the kisses to catch Kyr’s lips with his own. A quick peck for now, since he still couldn’t hold back the light laughter. ❝  Hi.  ❞  He says quietly, heart fluttering at the sight of him. It always did. “What are you doing here?” sat gently on the tip of his tongue, but with it came the realization that golden light was spilling through his curtains onto Kyr’s face, the small lull of joy shattered. Patroclus frowned and looked quickly at the time on his phone... 6:00 pm. An hour passed the time he and Kyr were supposed to have met. He noticed the handful of missed calls and texts from his boyfriend, too. Oh no. Stomach twisting, he looked up at Kyr again, patting the arms still wrapped around him urgently.  ❝  Kyr, I’m so sorry, let me get up and get ready.  ❞  He was typically pretty good about not being this late. He also wasn’t sure how he’d missed Kyr’s calls and texts. The burgeoning fear that Kyr might be upset with him despite the greeting set in quickly and with great force. There was a lot that his boyfriend had to put up with from him for school and the like and he couldn’t help wondering, on occasion, if one slip might be just a little too much. Not that he thought Kyr wouldn’t tell him if that were the case. Patroclus simply sat somewhere between courtesy and worst-case-scenario at least fifty percent of the time. 

❛   @duskwilt​​​​​ asked:   [Pyrrha; Iris] ❛  nothing stays the same forever.  ❜  !  

     (  ⌨  )  —  Iris pauses for a moment as he feels his eyes begin to burn and his throat tighten. He knew Pyrrha was right. Especially with something like this where he was actively working for an organization that had more or less kidnapped him and thrown together a group of super powered people and people with above-average intelligence  to take down another organization of slightly worse repute in his mind. Even so, he can’t help the tears that gather and the breath that stutters out of his throat as he opens his mouth to respond.

He can’t, at first. Closing his mouth and swallowing thickly a couple of times, trying to dislodge the lump that had formed in his throat, he found himself looking anywhere but at Pyrrha. It was difficult to let his gaze land anywhere since so much reminded him of the current conversation, so he let his gaze flit this way and that. 

Opening his mouth again, he ran his clammy palms down his jeans for a second and then shrugged, ❝  I- I know that.  ❞  Regardless of his best efforts, his voice still cracked on the last word and noted the tears were entirely too warm on his cheeks. He takes a deep, shaking breath as he goes to wipe at them, knowing it’s a futile endeavor but trying nonetheless. A bit like the relationships he’d built with his team. 

❝  I just- I’ve lost one family already, you know  ?  ❞  His voice sounds wobbly to his own ears, so he can’t begin to imagine how it sounds to Pyrrha. He’ll have to apologize for this later.  

❛   @duskwilt​​​ asked:   "Nikita," Pyrrha calls as she prepares two cups of tea, dragging out the last vowel for a couple seconds longer than necessary, "What's your first language?"    !

     (  ⚔  )  —   Pausing in his reading to listen to Pyrrha when he hears the way she draws out the last vowel of his name, he puts his book down and turns his full attention to her. This sounds like it’ll be a longer conversation than just a quick question and answer. Even if the answer itself wasn’t a difficult one. 

❝  I have three,  ❞  he says, holding up three fingers,  ❝  Ukrainian, Russian, and Japanese. The only other language I’m fluent in is English.  ❞  This knowledge had surprised the majority of his team. He wondered if it would be the same for Pyrrha. He doubted it. Very little seemed to surprise her.